Large companies operate very complex information technology (IT) system landscapes and perform developments on their own to further enhance their IT solutions that support their business processes. To streamline this approach, so called templates are developed centrally, containing developments and configuration, in a separated environment and rolled out to subsidiaries, divisions, and the like to support the business processes in a common way.
In the subsidiaries and divisions, these processes are localized, or adjusted, due to differing regional and local requirements, such as may arise through regional and local legal requirements, accounting standards, customs, and the like. For this purpose separate instances of IT systems are often implemented for such purposes and as a result, the centrally developed templates are changed
However, development of templates is typically an expensive endeavor in terms of money, time, and resources. Further, departure from the templates may further increase expense in local development and maintenance effort and can result in data and process divergence across the broader enterprise of a large company.